Evidence of Arctic Warming Already in Early 1900’s

Scientific Advances, November 24

Sampling of marine debris indicates that the Arctic may have already begun warming in the early 1900’s. These samples, using sediment from the Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard and covering the past 800 years in detailed 5- or 10-year intervals throughout, show stable conditions in terms of salinity and temperature until that pattern was broken around 1900. Beginning at that time, the Arctic increasingly showed signs of “Atlantification” — with fresher water, indicating increasing melt from Greenland and Arctic glaciers; less sea ice cover; and warmer waters, likely caused by both atmospheric warming and the greater incursion of warmer mid-latitude ocean water. Since ocean warming tends to lag behind that of the atmosphere, these research findings are significant, and join more anecdotal evidence from Arctic expedition records from the later 1800’s and onward that increasing industrial CO2 emissions and related global warming began impacting the Arctic early in the last century.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2946